“I’ve been waiting all day inside / Waiting for a summer sky,” croons Yannis Philippakis on “2001”, the lead single from Foals’ celebratory seventh album, Life is Yours. Its post-pandemic party grooves mark a significant change of mood from the yowling indie storm of 2019’s Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost: Part Two.
Since then, keyboardist Edwin Congreave has left the band and begun a postgraduate economics degree at Cambridge University, hoping to help find solutions to the “imminent climate catastrophe”. The remaining members seem to have followed James Brown’s famous suggestion that “the one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing”. Their muscular concoction of funk-rock-pop includes nods to the godfather of soul along with Prince, Chic, Talking Heads, Duran Duran and LCD Soundsystem.
